


Glory, Glory

by bexacaust



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Forced Memory Viewing, Gen, Minor Drug Reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 06:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6970096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bexacaust/pseuds/bexacaust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Glory, glory unto the highest; praise be unto Primus, hallelujah.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glory, Glory

_Ashes to ashes, funk to_ **funky**  
We know **Major Tom’s** a junkie  
Strung out in **heaven’s** high  
Hitting an **all-time low**

“You glorify what you don’t understand; and that’s cause you’re a fraggin’ IDIOT.”

Dai Atlas reared back as Deadlock let his voice sound with ease, a grace previously unseen in the Decepticon.

Deadlock merely smiled, “An’ it peeves you when I say that, don’t it? And we all know why; ‘s cause it’s true. Think about it.”

Deadlock took a step forward as Wing watched, demure, quiet and curious. Deadlock cocked his helm, twitching a finial, “You glorify life but you don’t know what that means. You tell me I oughta be thankful for Primus lettin’ me be here an’ for what I’ve been through, yeah?”

Deadlock scoffed, “Figures a senator would say that.”

“I am no senator.”

“Anymore. You’re what we fought against in the beginning. It’s your kind that left me in the gutters, killed Gasket, flung my old leader t’the pits. Its you lot who made us and then wanted t’break us. An’ you never asked WHY.”

Dai Atlas was shaking in barely restrained anger.

Deadlock stood in front of him, expression frigid and bitter, “For a buncha mechs so focused on purity, you sure glorify a helluva lot of sin and vice.”

“How dare you!”

Deadlock laughed, ragged and serrated as Dai Atlas dug overlarge fingers into seams to lift Deadlock and try to shake him.

Click.

Dai Atlas looked to the side to see Deadlock unspool a cable, wrapping it around his palm and yanking. Dai Atlas jerked, dropping the Decepticon and freezing as white finials wiggled gleefully. Dai Atlas stared, shocked that Deadlock would have been able to find the cable’s compartment, much less be able to so rapidly free it to use as a rein.

“Rejoice, rejoice, for our Creator and God hath given us life.”, said Deadlock in mockery, “If that’s true, if you can stand behind that li’l phrase from a pretty tome then let’s see what you want me to glorify, yeah? Lemme show you what you tell me to praise in your stupid hymns, hm?”

“What are you doing?!”

Deadlock smiled, eyes alight in vengeance as his free hand reached to his own helm and popped a small portcover.

“I’m showin’ you life, old mech. I’m showin’ you the other side of your glory-be’s and your hallelujahs. And I ain’t gonna be easy on you, no, no packets t’delete and pretend about. I’m gonna drown you in y’r own hypocrisy til you speak like a Dead-Ender.”

Scars still on the glimpses of protoform around the helmport that would access the memory core showed a lifetime of struggle in matte-black dots and lines.

Deadlock smiled as Dai Atlas swallowed hard, watching as the cable was unwound from Deadlock’s hand but still held taut. The jack on the end was tapped against the helm port.

Deadlock’s smile went vicious, “Boost me, _baby_.”

Click.

Five kliks for the sequence to begin; five kliks Dai Atlas tried to move like lightning and disengage. Deadlock stood, tall and proud and never-quite-broken and didn’t flinch when Dai Atlas’s hand froze a nanometer from his throat.

And then a scream of pain, pure and crystalline, was ripped from Dai Atlas’s vocalizer. He stumbled back, Deadlock following and watching as the massive mech fell to his knees and clutched his processor; trying in vain to brace with firewalls and blocks that were torn down with no mercy nor quarter by Deadlock.

“What’s wrong, Dai Atlas?”, sneered Drift, hand darting out to hook servos into a chestplate seam and force the leader to remain balanced on his knees, “What’sa matter, mechling? I thought you wanted t’CELEBRATE life! This is my life, mechling, START PARTYING!”

Dai Atlas howled again, looking into Deadlock’s optics and trying to plead for the images to stop. Death and gore, suffering and sin and all the things he had tried to ignore when he was once governmental royalty. He shuddered, gagging as his helm tipped back and he sobbed once. Deadlock didn’t move, held him there.

Braced him.

Until the stream of memory slowed and stopped on a vision of the pair right now, Deadlock looking down at a shuddering Dai Atlas.

Deadlock leaned down, popping the jack from his helm and letting the cable fall and he smiled. Whispering by Dai Atlas’s audial, he let the words roll off his glossa like hydrochloric acid, “Glory, glory unto the highest; praise be unto Primus, _hallelujah_.”

And he shoved Dai Atlas away from him, letting the larger mech collapse backwards and sit heavily on his aft and do nothing but shake. Deadlock stood, looking at the other Knights who moved forwards with the intent to attack him-

“DO NOT TOUCH HIM!!”

The room froze, and Wing watched.

Dai Atlas vented hard, focusing on the floor at Deadlock’s feet, “D-Do not touch him. Lay no hand on him.”

Wing advanced, breezing past his fellow Knights to kneel by Dai Atlas, to coax him into standing once again under the vengeful eye of the Archangel in mech form.

Dai Atlas leaned heavily on Wing, looking at Deadlock with an eerie mixture of both fear and reverance in his optics.

Deadlock exvented quietly, and spoke once again, “All those time y’called me Unmaker’s spawn thinking I couldn’t hear you… All those time you hissed that I was born ‘f the Inferno and every DAMN TIME I heard you call me filth.”, Deadlock’s gaze was edged in poison and hardened like fire-tempered steel, “Now you know. If I’m the spawn, you and yours made me this way. If I’m some devil in armor plating it was YOUR fires that made me like this and if I’m FILTH then you are the festerin’ heap of slag I crawled out of.”

Deadlock sneered as Wing moved from Dai Atlas’s side.

“Remember that, next time you hold me up for judgement. Think back on the fun little story you got to watch the next time you tell me to be THANKFUL for the life I’ve lived.”

Wing laid a hand on Deadlock’s shoulder, whispering for him to be calm and to await him outside the chamber. As the Decepticon’s steps rang like a military drill and the door slammed, Wing looked to Dai Atlas.

“Do you see, now? Why bringing him here was not a transgression?”, asked Wing, “I needed to show him. I needed to show him that not all polished plating hides a monster beneath it.”

Dai Atlas nodded.

“Out of any of us here, you owe him most of all.”, said Wing, “You may have turned your back on the Senate, you may have rejected what the Senate tried to do or the means it used but you CANNOT turn your back on the lives that were broken because of those choices. There is always a penance to pay, Dai Atlas. You taught me that.”

And Wing took his leave, his namesake hanging down his back like a cloak; the covering of a visitor to a holy city found guilty of such sin.

_There is always a penance to pay._

Dai Atlas shuddered, covering his mouth with a hand but failing as he retched and leaned forward, a dribble of unprocessed energon leaking from his intake as he remembered what he was shown.

_There is **ALWAYS** a penance to pay._


End file.
